SHANNON, BURSTYN OUTSTANDING

MALCOLM JOHNSON; Special to The CourantTHE HARTFORD COURANT

- "The Little Flower of East Orange" begins as a surreal hospital drama, then becomes more naturalistic in a dynamic confrontation between mother Therese Marie and son Danny, acted with power and pain by Ellen Burstyn and Michael Shannon.

By the play's end, "The Little Flower of East Orange" - the title refers to Therese Marie as a kind of saint - evolves into a surprisingly moving play about an aging parent and her prodigal son. Director Philip Seymour Hoffman's continuing bond with playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis has produced a production that will pierce the heart of anyone who has watched an aged parent pass.

The new Public-LAByrinth production, vividly staged by Hoffman, opened Sunday night at the Public Theater as the latest collaboration between the two companies. The new play by Guirgis focuses most intensely on the ailing mother and the raging addict son, but a ghost from another time, the woman's deaf mute father Francis James, haunts the dimly lighted stage of Martinson Hall, high up at the Public.

Danny, rumpled and edgy as played by the intense Shannon, opens with a brief address to the audience after a plainclothes detective uncuffs him. "I call this a story because Truth is elusive, subjective and fleeting." Though he dismisses the notion that he is a writer, he ends with a bit of poetic fantasy: "Once upon a time, there was a little girl who could roller skate over rooftops."

A gurney carrying an unconscious white-haired woman in an oxygen mask is wheeled in by two hospital workers, Magnolia and Espinosa. As broadly acted by David Zayas, Espinosa provides comic relief. He and Liza Colon-Zayas also underline the stated commitment of the LAByrinth to Latino actors.

Neither the orderly nor the nurse at this city-owned hospital in the Bronx can see Francis James, who hovers on the edge of the scene. The designer, Narelle Sissons, has emphasized the otherworldly atmosphere with a series of semi-transparent screens around the periphery of the playing area. The gray texture of the lighting by Japhy Weideman furthers the hallucinatory aspects of Guirgis' writing.

Burstyn's Therese will not give her name at the hospital and seems to dwell in the past. She perceives an older black man, sweetly played by Arthur French, as Jimmy Stewart, and he goes along. But Therese's re-enacted recollections of her father, as she suffers a beating at his hands, point to the darker side of the "Little Flower" that emerges in Act II.

Therese steadfastly defends the sometimes brutal and careless Francis James, as embodied as a stodgy figure from the past by Howie Seago. "A fine man, a decent man," Burstyn intones softly. But Danny knows differently: "One violent, chaotic night, when my mother was 9 years old, she made the decision that someone had to protect her mother and her little sister." Her father smashed her head against a boiler, but a threat to call the police stayed his hand in the future.

In the present, the visions of Therese continue as she imagines encounters with Pope John XXIII, Colon-Zayas again and Bobby Kennedy, one of five roles for Sidney Williams. The play then slips back to the early childhood of Therese Marie, with her adoring father and his dreams of her becoming a teacher of the deaf.

Espinosa injects more humor when he calls an uncomprehending non-Hispanic David Halzig "Puto" (male prostitute). He explains, "it means, like, 'friend.' " A Detective Baker questions Therese about her visit to the Cloisters where she took the fall that brought her to the hospital.

At last, the bed-ridden woman identifies herself as Therese Sullivan O' Connor of 440 Riverside Drive. Then after an angry trip across the country with Nadine, Danny arrives. He then meets the tough-talking Justina in a crummy neighborhood gin mill. Danny stays on to get plastered, and later tells of his birth when his mother was 40, and of the arrival of Justina years later. He imagines Francis James and says, "Like a deaf, drunk, God-fearing, child-beating, Willful Shanty Irishman during the Depression." And the first act ends.

In Act II, Danny talks with his mother about his lost marriage. Then Espinosa plays out a scene on the hospital roof with his "Puto." Eventually, Therese is discharged, but Danny refuses to send her to a nursing home, even a Jewish nursing home, and they end up together back on Riverside Drive.

It is there that "Little Flower" intensifies as Danny forces his mother to confront the truth about her past, how she spent 10 years mending in a hospital after hauling her blacked-out father upstairs after her back injury had been successfully repaired.

Under Hoffman's sensitive direction, Burstyn and Shannon surpass themselves, as Therese and Danny drink scotch together while he pries the bitter truth from her. Burstyn shows the obstinacy and toughness of Therese Marie, while Shannon draws Danny as a man on a precipice, who winds up in the slammer, leaving Justina to preside over the death of their mother.

THE LITTLE FLOWER OF EAST ORANGE runs through May 4 by the LAByrinth Theater Companyat the theater complex, 425 Lafayette St., New York, N.Y.